Markus" notch" Persson tweets the release of some prototype screenshots from 0x10cͨ, Mojang's upcoming space game. He's also added a note to the section mentioning "hard science fiction" to back off that a bit: "Update: GAH, NO! I'm focusing on fun gameplay instead. I still want to get corrected on glaring scientific errors, though."

LFace wrote on Apr 13, 2012, 03:59:I dont agree with everything Notch does from a business point of view, such as how slow and incomplete minecraft is with a shed load of bugs and stuff, but I feel I ought to at least set things straight with the comments in this thread that these screenshots are from the "finished" game. They clearly are not. They are from the first few stages of development of his level designer. Moaning about how crap it looks this early is as stupid as moaning how bad Quake 3 would have looked before any texturing and animation and even the rounded vertices used for archways and stuff. Its work in progress.

I don't think anyone that commented in this thread was under the impression that these were anywhere near finished quality. We weren't born yesterday (well, I wasn't, I don't know about the rest of you ). It's obvious what these shots were from and how they came to be. If anyone was fooled into thinking they were of a finished product, I have a whole bunch of prime FL swamp-...uh, I mean, beachfront property on the market for cheap...

panbient wrote on Apr 12, 2012, 11:15:Same as the loss of 1000FPS between the 1st and 2nd screens where the only difference seems to be looking at the center of the room as opposed to the top right corner and increasing the brightness so you can actually see that you're in an rather empty room...

uh, he used an area light in the second shot to cast shadows that get softer as they get further away from their source. it was like "LOL.. look how slow it was when i tried this thing".

Well that's certainly nice now that it's explained. Prior to this comment all we could do was derive conclusions based on the screens. What I saw was a 50% drop in performance at the application of low rez textures, then another 90-95% drop for shadows. Early build or not, losing half your performance on a static shot after applying low quality textures seems like a concern.

I watched him coding some of the engine the other night on his streaming feed and these screenshots shown here are through various stages of development when testing theories and different methods. I saw him go from having static blocks (a la Minecraft), to having editable blocks that you alter in real time yourself like a basic 3D modelling program, and that you see here in these screenshots is the stages of this.

These came from twitter where he was messing around and prototyping different things for a laugh such as adding the wood texture from minecraft to the polygons he has in his prototype engine.

I dont agree with everything Notch does from a business point of view, such as how slow and incomplete minecraft is with a shed load of bugs and stuff, but I feel I ought to at least set things straight with the comments in this thread that these screenshots are from the "finished" game. They clearly are not. They are from the first few stages of development of his level designer. Moaning about how crap it looks this early is as stupid as moaning how bad Quake 3 would have looked before any texturing and animation and even the rounded vertices used for archways and stuff. Its work in progress.

panbient wrote on Apr 12, 2012, 11:15:Same as the loss of 1000FPS between the 1st and 2nd screens where the only difference seems to be looking at the center of the room as opposed to the top right corner and increasing the brightness so you can actually see that you're in an rather empty room...

uh, he used an area light in the second shot to cast shadows that get softer as they get further away from their source. it was like "LOL.. look how slow it was when i tried this thing".

Sepharo wrote on Apr 12, 2012, 19:58:Like others have said, you build your ship in the game with a 3D modeling tool. If you think you can do better than what is in the screenshots... you'll have a chance to prove it.

Looks like he was testing the shapes, the computer screen overlay, shadowing, and importing character models.

OH EM GEE WHERE ARE THE TEXTURES WAAHHH.

Oh come on, Sepharo, you can't tell me that Elite 3 didn't look miles better than Elite 2?! The difference? Textures (among others). I am surprised though that in this whole thread only one person mentioned Elite. I don't know why, but for some reason this game reminds me much of the much-hyped and forever vapor game, 10th Planet. Anyone remember that one? Never came out, was cancelled quite a while into the project but for some reason this and that seem to have some kind of connection...and, no, it's not because they both have '10' in the title...

EXTRA CREDIT: In what genre, and by what name, was the only Red Storm (Rainbow Six) game developed but never released? The right answer gets the 'Cookie of Knowledge'...

Sepharo wrote on Apr 12, 2012, 19:58:Like others have said, you build your ship in the game with a 3D modeling tool. If you think you can do better than what is in the screenshots... you'll have a chance to prove it.

Looks like he was testing the shapes, the computer screen overlay, shadowing, and importing character models.

OH EM GEE WHERE ARE THE TEXTURES WAAHHH.

And heck, he's already said he changed his mind and wants to use some textures Doesn't pay to get bent out of shape over a game that's been in development for all of a few weeks.

"America is like an MMO where an early guild already took 90% of the good farming grounds, boss raids and rares while everyone else is still trying to level up on low-level mobs" -Some Guy on Reddit

Mad Max RW wrote on Apr 12, 2012, 11:21:I'm not sure what he's trying to show off here. It looks like placeholder stuff for testing the lighting engine. Why even waste time posting this?

I'm not sure what you're trying to critique here. It looks like content-less stuff for criticizing the developer for some reason. Why even waste time posting this?

This guy's giving everyone the full details of the game as he develops it. Some people like seeing how a game is made: viewing the progress from step one to step seven million. It's not like he's personally emailing the screenshots to you and asking you to comment. If you don't want to see 0x10^c or whatever until it's done, then just ignore it until it's done.

Cool story, bro. The fact this is getting posted as news on multiple websites makes it kind of impossible to ignore.

Beelzebud wrote on Apr 12, 2012, 12:28:He has said that he's going for plain polygons with no textures, as the "style" of the game, so it's fair to criticize that aspect. If he was worried about people criticizing alpha quality screen shots, he wouldn't be posting them online...

Whaa... seriously? So it'd look even worse than minecraft.... well that lowers my hype to 0 ;p

What you wrote isn't even business related, its common sense. Never show your game before you have something Interesting to show. (Meaning, develop the core gameplay hook, show it with crap graphics = good ||||| show crap graphics with no gameplay = bad)

And these screenshots.. sorry.. are complete, and utter, crap. I have no idea what this is even supposed to show. That the engine can render textures (slowly) and point lights?

Notch probably plopped that together in a minute to show of that his basic code was working. All the people going 'Ohmaygaurd its not chrisis grafphics I'm ragequitting aaaa' are probably people who would spend an hour in UDK or Halflife 2's SDK and probably not manage to make something half as good visually as those prototype pics. That said, the end result probably won't have amazing graphics. So what?

Data wrote on Apr 12, 2012, 14:32:Boy, you old gaming Geezers have no fucking imagination at all. Notch, I am inspired by your old school, clinky 3d graphics.

Bad 3d graphics don't inspire nostalgia.

This old gaming geezer is mostly nostalgic about 2D graphics. Quake and Duke Nukem 3D's graphics might have dated but they still have artistic merit and a theme that brings it all together.

Posting a bunch of arbitrary untextured images that looked like they were thrown together by a programmer is hubris at it's best. I actually don't mind him doing this, but I understand why people point it out.

I'm interested in gameplay mechanics. The prettiest high budget game isn't going to win me over with only screenshots. Same goes for indie.

Now get off my sprite based lawn while I return to rocking on my 12 tri flatshaded rocking chair.